I've been wanting to get this info up, so finally, here it isAn excellent read from Jay Dyer @ Jay's Analysis.My personal take on Darwin ? Just another elitist pushing another elitist agenda.Keep an open mind, please. Read the whole piece entirely. I printed it up for ease of reading because, believe it or not, I hate reading at the computer. Truly!
"There are numerous misunderstandings surrounding the subjects of Genesis, creation, evolution, science and theology, which muddy the primordial goo even further than it already was (if only it was real!). From reliance on naïve positivism and empiricism to assumptions and equivocations over terms, the standard debates on these issues are often ill-served by both sides, including “Creationists” (and/or Intelligent Design proponents), generally due to bad philosophy. The same is true for the opponents of Creation, who almost never have a background in the philosophy science, which looks at the logos – the mechanics and workings – of the very thing they propose to practice and defend. The worst side of this matter is undoubtedly the Darwinian side, which I will argue is the most irrational and incoherent of all, and that rather than a position that need be taken seriously and conciliated or reconciled to theology, ought to be dispensed with as preposterous. The purpose of this essay is, in part, to respond to a recent defense of “Theistic Evolution,” as well as to shed light on more fundamental, presuppositional problems in this often misguided debate (with more to follow in the future).The Evolution of Darwinian Evolution and Anti-Epistemological Self-NegationThe most misunderstood and simultaneously most important factor to grasp is how presuppositions and paradigms function as templates to interpret “facts.” An epistemological mistake that has become the entrenched norm since the Enlightenment’s tabula rasa is the presumption there are “brute facts” that come un-interpreted, outside of some contextual framework or worldview. In the older paradigm, which retained a more classical anthropology where man was seen as a created being, man was equipped with a host of faculties from God, endowing him with the ability to will, act, learn and modify his environment. This holistic view was grounded in a wide-ranging metaphysical anthropology inherited primarily from the Eastern Christian Tradition and the Christology of the 7 Ecumenical Councils, but also with terminological and conceptual insights and analogies from the Greek philosophical tradition.The revolutions of the Enlightenment period repositioned man in a vast, mechanistic, determined cosmos of flux and brute “causality” in which he sought to become the ultimate agent and source of meaning itself. Western Establishment science eventually came to reflect this revolution in thought by offering a new paradigm of the natural sciences, where man was now the chance product of endless aeons of chaos and flux. The crucial point to keep in mind for our discussion is the fact that the purely “naturalistic” framework for understanding the world was promulgated with an astounding degree of propaganda and top-down dogmatism, notably from the Royal Society. Evolutionary naturalism, as we will explore, is undoubtedly and certainly a conspiracy, and not at all a “neutral” theory of “open scientific inquiry,” as it pretends to be.It is this notion of scientific and epistemic “neutrality” which must first be examined and dispensed with first. Presuming to interpret the phenomena of experience without a contextual framework or schema within one’s lexicon of linguistic symbols becomes self-evident upon reflection, yet mysteriously eluded so many of the empiricists of the last few centuries precisely because it contradicted their dogma of tabula rasa. Ironically, this is already an older, outdated philosophy of perception that perfectly mirrored the zeitgeist of a Hume, Kant or Locke. For those studied in modern philosophy of science, phenomenology and traditions counter to the Darwinian ethos, there are numerous indicators which show the “facts” of our experience are rather parts of a network of signs and symbols, as well as being situated within a “web” or our wider or more foundational beliefs and assumptions about the world.The earthworm, for example, was famously hailed by Darwin himself, as well as many of his disciples today, to be the most important “evolutionary appearance” prior to the supposed “dawn of man.” Let’s take the earthworm as an example of how science actually functions on the ground, and consider what philosophical and perceptual truths emerge that are, in fact prior to the actual praxis of the scientific method. The earthworm investigated in the lab is the earthworm as known, experienced and interpreted by the individual scientist, given his inner framework of past experiences, accumulated knowledge and present “direct” experiences with the slimy dirt-dweller, all of which form an interpretation of the object before him in his lab. Upon reflection, it should be self-evident that the mechanics of how this creature is understood will be informed intuitively by the mind of the scientist’s conceptions concerning it. In other words, the earthworm does not spontaneously generate its own, wholly new meaning to the fresh mind’s eye, nor does a scientific blank slate of perception simply record quantitative “facts” about the object, add them all up and produce an earthworm calculus for all such “species.”This earthworm did not appear out of a vacuum with an instruction manual, nor does the mere quantification of its length, weight, diet, etc. afford the scientist all possible earthworm gnosis. While these points seem obvious to us as we read and ponder the actual actions of perceiving phenomena in any given scientific lab, this naïve empiricism is still the normative approach and presupposition for mainstream science! This, in fact, is why modern science tends to avoid the questions of philosophy of science, relegating them to the dustbin, along with medieval metaphysics and angels because it pretends they are unanswerable. However, they are not unanswerable, but rather the answers and explanations for such questions are not what mainstream science wants to hear.
“I’m now certain from carbon tasting this earthworm has expired and is at least 64 million years old
Why this is so is obvious, as it immediately brings metaphysics back into the picture, but not only metaphysics, it immediately shows the inescapable need for, and usage of, invariant, immaterial, conceptual realities (such as laws of logic, mathematics, etc.), which are not coherent in most paradigms of secular and naturalistic materialistic science. While I am not advocating Husserl’s notion of “bracketing,” Husserl certainly showed the scientific method itself operates on principles of logic, inference, coherence and regularity that are not empirically knowable or verifiable, in his Logical Investigations. For example, the principle of induction, upon which all of science is founded, cannot be known of verified empirically. That the future will be like the past, as Hume consistently showed, cannot be known by past or present empirical observations without begging the question or being circular. In a Christian context, of course, we have a reason for believing the future will be like the past and nature will function with regularity, known as the Providence of God. While seemingly laughable and jeered at by modern self-negating man, this is perfectly coherent, if the kind of God professed exists, yet utterly incoherent in the worldview professed by the naturalist, and especially the naïve empiricist naturalist (which is the majority of that camp to this day). Indeed, that scientists are so ignorant of philosophy – and by extension logic – is really a folly to their own detriment (and a source of most of this nonsense). As philosopher of science Michael Polanyi commented: “To say that the discovery of objective truth in science consists in the apprehension of a rationality which commands our respect and arouses our contemplative admiration, that such discovery, while using the experience of our senses as clues, transcends this experience by embracing the vision of a reality beyond the impression of our senses, a vision which speaks for itself in guiding us to an even deeper understanding of reality-such an account of scientific procedure would be generally shrugged aside as out-dated Platonism: a piece of mystery-mongering unworthy of an enlightened age. Yet it is precisely on this conception of objectivity that I wish to insist in.” (Personal Knowledge, p. 5-6)
Fraudulent drawings- who knew! Haeckel’s invented “Moneron.” Ernst Haeckel’s fake drawings, altered to show different embryos in stages of development, as published by him in Anthropogenie, in Germany, 1874. Like I said, much, much more to read at Jay's so scoot over and have a readAnd at the very end of this informative, enlightening and thought provoking piece - Problems with Evolution are presented- Give it a listenThen share some thoughts- Speaking for myself, me being the only person I can speak for, the whole article and all linked info was extremely interesting.